


The Practical and the Desirable

by Val Mora (valmora)



Series: tie kink 'verse [8]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aged-Up Character, Car Sex, Commitment, Kink Meme, M/M, Post-Sburb, Suits, Weddings, they get away with it, worldfusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 06:27:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Karkat chill on the other side of the house from where the newly-wedded Mss. Lalonde and Maryam are being ostentatiously NSFW in the privacy of their own room.</p><p>They decide to pay them back.  On Kanaya's car.  In the suits she made for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Practical and the Desirable

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in response to [a request on the Homestuck KM](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/10240.html?thread=18353152#t18353152) for, essentially, a sequel to an [earlier piece](http://archiveofourown.org/works/243623) in this series, though this piece stands on its own.
> 
> The reference to teeth is borrowed from [Slipstream](http://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream), from a system in which dental quadrants correspond to romantic ones, and teeth from the appropriate region of the mouth may be given as love tokens in committed relationships.
> 
> Thanks as always to my beta.

John drives Nepeta and Equius to the train station after wedding cleanup is over. Rose has a really nice car, a sleek little Lotus (he figured between the Lotus and Kanaya's Engenerator, a gorgeous organic terrorcar that makes Lamborghinis look clunky, he'd take the one he wasn't afraid would eat him) and he chats awhile with Nepeta about what it's like in the Alternian manga translation biz these days.

He feels kind of lonely on the ride back, but Karkat, rumpled and looking really, really good, is sitting on the lowest step leading into the garage when John parks. Like, the suit looked good before, because it was made to Karkat's measurements, but now it's picked up some creases, which fits Karkat's personality better. John thinks it looks sort of noirish.

"Are you waiting for me?"

Karkat unfolds a little, uncrossing his elbows from around his knees. "I'm hiding."

"What from?"

"I was going to change clothes, but Rose and Kanaya went off to exercise their newly-sociopolitically-endorsed right to fuck, the pheromones are leaking out the door of their respiteblock, and you can hear them through the wall."

"So you're on the other side of the house?"

"Yeah."

John chuckles; Karkat glares at him.

Karkat wears sunglasses when he goes out in public so people don't see his eyes, but since the wedding was among friends he left them off. The black tie and grey pocket square just make them stand out.

Karkat never got out of the habit of making eye contact, and Kanaya's told John that the way he does it is viewed as particularly aggressive, especially for someone so short and with such relatively small horns.

John just likes it - he can read a lot from Karkat's expression, the way he uses his eyebrows, the curves of his mouth.

"Where's everyone else?"

"The sunglass-unsporting team of visual and musical trauma known as the D-bag Strider Retinue are without doubt being obscene somewhere, if Messrs Tauromachian Manzai Slam haven't wandered off to go attempt to conceive more little herpeterrors while their existing spawn act like Tavros in enclosed spaces and break everything in sight."

John has to laugh and gather Karkat to himself, holding him close and warm. "Does the wi-fi go out this far?"

Karkat grunts affirmatively. "My phone was working. Why?"

"Because if you refuse to be social, and I'm feeling pretty social, then what say we run a two-person mode of Wukong?"

"If you play an Orator again I'll skin you," Karkat grumbles, making room for John to pass him on the stair. "My husktop's in our respiteblock, though."

"So's mine. I'm not afraid of hearing anything, so if you really want I can get both."

"Good idea."

It's not as bad as Karkat made it out to be. John can hardly hear anything from the next room over besides rustling sheets and heavy breathing.

He gathers his and Karkat's laptops, and power cables, and carries them down to the stairs to the garage, where Karkat is sitting, reading something on his phone. 

"Abdelrahman's been nominated to chair the UN's Interworld Affairs department." Karkat says. The Alternian rolling purr on the _r_ and the long throaty dryness of the _h_ in the name make John want to taste the word as it rumbles its way out of Karkat's mouth.

"Is it her or Tran who said that the logical conclusion to political correctness towards Alternia was to stop making roach motels?"

Karkat's mouth twists with amusement as he tucks his phone back in his pocket, reaching to take his laptop from John. "Neither; that was Klein. Abdelrahman's been saying for years that breaches of the Interworld Accords are essentially unacceptable, because Feferi is under political pressure to invade and conquer Earth, and if the Accords break down the political mess would be so bad she'd never be able to regain de facto control of Alternia without culling half the hemospectrum."

John flails his fingers on the trackpad, waiting for his computer to finish booting up. "You think that's true?"

Karkat brushes his finger over the blood-scanner that passes as part of security on troll computers. "I think Feferi would destroy every Warp terminal and kill every sciensamurai who could reconstruct them before she let the gills take over Earth the way they've taken over every other planet before this."

"Not a lot in it for her," John says softly. 

Karkat keyboardsmashes in his game login. "Alternia is resource-poor and the constant conquest is really just looting. If she can prove that cooperation creates more gains than just stripping every single natural resource for the Fleet and moving on, she can change the whole economic structure, and maybe end culling and hemospectral discrimination while she's at it."

John grins over at him. Karkat's face is lit blue by the light from his computer screen, adorably grumpy. "You're amazing, you know that?"

"That's because your nearest relative is a squeakbeast doomed to spend its life attempting puzzles in the name of cognitive and behavioral science."

John laughs and leans his head against Karkat's shoulder. The wireless is surprisingly good in this part of the house, and their own tiny, two-person game is pretty nice. Karkat doesn't talk much once the game starts, and they play for a while in silence.

After a while, like maybe an hour, Karkat says, "My husktop needs to be plugged in."

There aren't any outlets on the stairs, and it sounds like Dave and Tavros and Gamzee and the wigglers are there, and he doesn't want to make Karkat hang out with them. So he puts his laptop down and goes out into the garage, looks around, and sees an outlet right in front of Kanaya's car.

They plug in their computers. The power cables aren't long enough to let them keep sitting on the stairs, and there isn't anywhere else to sit.

"Fuck it," Karkat says, and sits on the pristine, glowing white hood of the Engenerator. He wiggles a little and sets the laptop back on his knees.

A part of John's soul dies, but he sits on the hood, too. They're probably leaving prints everywhere and knowing his luck he'll leave black smears all over the finish and they might dent it and

He keeps playing the game.

Not too long after that, they get to a good pause point in the game, so they do, and Karkat gets off the hood to stretch, while John lies back (head resting on the plane of the windshield, and now there will be oil from his skin all over the glass).

Karkat puts his hands on his hips and leans back, head tilting and exposing his throat. The necktie pointing straight down his body is doubly suggestive with his hips canted forwards for balance.

"You wanna go back to our room and bug Rose and Kanaya by making out next door to them?" John asks.

Karkat stands back up and wrinkles his nose. "They'd just do something snarky and accommodatingly passive-aggressive, like come knock on the door and ask if we needed more condoms or lubricant."

That's...probably true. "It's not like we'd have to open the door."

Karkat gives him a disbelieving sort of frown. "It wouldn't matter, and half the time we don't even use them anyway."

"Uh huh." John toes off one shoe and puts his socked foot up on the car hood, watching Karkat. They messed around this morning, while they were getting dressed, but didn't actually get anywhere because Kanaya would have made shoes out of them if they'd ruined the suits.

"It would still be horrible." 

"You're being neurotic," John points out.

Karkat gives him a once-over. "He says, while blatantly posing on top of a car in an attempt to lure me into sex."

John laughs. "Nah, you just have a dirty mind."

" _He says_." Karkat takes a step closer, puts one knee up on the hood of the car and leans over John, one hand on either side of his shoulders. "After pawing at me this morning and whining miserably about _blue balls!_ even after deciding that it would be terrible timing to fuck just then." 

"We would've been so late."

"So, like I said. You're a sex maniac." A couple locks of Karkat's ruffled mess of hair hang down; he shakes them out of his face, ineffectively, and then his other knee is brushing John's thigh.

"He _says_ ," John parrots back at him, deliberately obnoxious, and curls his hand in the lapel of Karkat's suit jacket before pulling him down for a kiss.

Karkat's elbows clunk against the car, and he does that thing that's at once super-adorable and really hot that's like trying to kiss deeper than he actually can, before pulling away and saying, annoyed but really happy because Karkat kind of enjoys being annoyed at John, "I have been assuming for _sweeps_ that you are thinking about sex at all times and I have _never been wrong._ "

"You're biased," John points out. "If I'm thinking about sex enough to bring it up I'm probably thinking that you're thinking about sex too. Or I want you to think about sex. Or you think I'm thinking about sex and you're the one thinking about sex and I'm just amenable to it." He rests one hand on the back of Karkat's neck. Karkat is warm, like always, against his palm.

"You should shut up for the good of sentient lifeforms everywhere," Karkat says, and then, "If you say 'make me' I am going to-"

"Do something anatomically improbable and painful-sounding when you could just be, you know, kissing me." He doesn't have to pull Karkat down to him, because Karkat just stretches out on top, one hip digging into John's upper thigh, his belt buckle heady pressure against John's hip.

John rolls his hips up, even though his dick is closer to Karkat's belly than his bulge, and Karkat pushes back just a little, then sinks his weight down, pinning John into the kiss.

Karkat can kiss forever. He can hold his breath for insane amounts of time, and it drives John crazy sometimes, being cut off from his sense of Karkat's existence in the swirl of air passing into and out of his lungs. Forever, until John doesn't know who's breathing and who's not, or whether they even need to breathe at all, if they could both just live forever on the feeling of drinking each other in.

Eventually Karkat lets him go, and John gasps under him, heaving for breath and transcendently glad to be feeling Karkat lungs-deep again. Karkat exhales, takes a breath, lets it out instead of holding it, and grinds down.

John's hands land on his ass, fingers sliding over the fabric of his suit, trying to pull him closer. Karkat moves with him, then sighs, rearing up onto his knees on the hood of the car and looking around.

"I hope they keep a bucket around here," he says, "because I was _specifically and indelibly informed_ after Kanaya was given this car, that The Rear Row Of Seats Is Far Too Small For Comfortable Sexual Activity, which is really a sign that sex _shouldn't be happening_ in the car to begin with, but-" he gets up off the hood of the car and stalks over to the shelving. Hidden behind a gallon jug of antifreeze is a plastic bucket.

Holding the handle at arm's length with two fingers, Karkat sets the bucket down on the floor.

"Is it as weird and awkward to use your moirail's pail as I think it might be?" John asks.

"No, this one's just covered in dirt."

Karkat kneels back on the hood of the car again, but before he can lie back down, John reaches up and undoes Karkat's belt, opens the fly of his suit pants. Untucks Karkat's shirt and lays his hand over Karkat's half-unsheathed bulge through the cloth of his boxers.

"Far be it from me to complain about sex, but what are you doing?"

"Kanaya will _kill_ us if we get the suits dirty."

"And?"

"And I like you in this suit! If we ruin it you'll never be able to wear it again."

Karkat looks down at himself, then back at John, one eyebrow raised.

"Yes, I can definitely see why you would want to have sex with a goblin in an Antarctic-dwelling wingbeast suit more than you would want to have sex with a goblin. Perfect sense."

Sometimes John wants to shake him. "Someday Kanaya will manage to explain fashion to you in a way that makes sense, even though it pretty much doesn't, and then you're going to clobber me with, like, something _even sexier_ than this and I'll pass out from hard-on."

"Is that even possible?"

"I don't know." Karkat's hands are resting on John's chest, and the cuffs of his sleeves are still closed with the Cancer-symbol cufflinks. John presses his lips to the metal cuff, then unfastens it, turning Karkat's hand over to kiss the inside of his wrist.

Karkat has heavy wrists, broad in comparison to the size of his hands, with his bones thick and sharp beneath his skin. John likes to press his lips there, to feel the faint pulse, the sense-memory of Karkat's powers.

"Eventually someone's going to look for us," Karkat says, and extricates his hand from John's grasp to unbutton his shirt.

"No they won't." John sits most of the way up and sheds his jacket, dropping it onto the other side of the car hood.

"Wigglers," Karkat says. "Puppetfetish Creepninja. Gamzee. Your _dad_."

His dad is probably smoking a pipe in the library and looking for cookbooks, but yeah, Karkat does have a point. "Better make it quick, then, huh."

Karkat reaches to his neck, pulls loose the knot of his tie. He's really gorgeous, a line of black circling his throat and trailing down towards the rumpled, untucked hem of his shirt and the fly of his pants, which hangs open over the swell of his half-unsheathed bulge in his briefs. Then he pulls the tie off and drops it on the hood of the car, and starts unbuttoning his shirt, silver and red flickering at one wrist as he moves.

He meets John's gaze somewhere around button number three, when his fingers brush against the pendant that rests over his troll heart-thingy. Curls an index finger over the ball chain that it hangs on, then goes back to undressing.

John licks at the back of his mouth, the smooth gum where his wisdom tooth would have been. The tooth Karkat won't take when he'll wear John's baby teeth, and John won't deny that it smarts a little, but fuck it, it's Rose and Kanaya's wedding day, and he and Karkat are going to have sex on Kanaya's sports car and it'll be awesome.

Karkat shrugs out of his shirt, pulls off the t-shirt under it. Sits there over John and looks down at him, lips curled into half a smile.

Without his teeth showing, he looks almost not-dangerous, but that's part of what John likes about him, how sometimes it's all Karkat can do to stop from smashing things or tearing himself literally to pieces. The way he curls around the phone talking to Kanaya, his breath sharp in his lungs and mouth until he calms down. 

John reaches for his own tie and pulls it off. Karkat watches him, dark pupils gone wide, swallowing up the red of his irises. Turnabout's fair play, John figures, reaching to start opening the buttons on his shirt. Karkat's hands slide out of the way to make room, and when John sits up to slough off the shirt and the tee under it, Karkat wraps his arms around John's ribs to hold him in place for a kiss.

So John holds him back, burying his hands in Karkat's hair as Karkat's tongue slides against his, no air flowing between them even with how close they are and John aching for it –

He pulls out of the kiss, chest heaving, and slides his hands down Karkat's bare back, past the line of his belt, to rest over the back pockets of his pants.

The fabric is _really nice_ and John is ridiculously fond of how good it feels to touch Karkat through it.

So he pulls Karkat into a grind, listens to him gasp in a breath - finally John can feel him again – and then does it again so Karkat gets the message, before lying back down on the hood of the car.

His head thunks against the windshield. "Ow."

Karkat smiles for real this time, all his teeth showing.

"Get down here," John says, because that expression makes him want to kiss Karkat, all smiles and amusement.

Karkat stretches out over him, forearms under John's shoulders, skin warm, and they kiss again. Karkat rolls his hips down against John's, then grumbles unhappily and cants up just enough to make room to open John's pants.

And then, fingers sliding over the flap of John's underwear – 

"Are those mine?"

"Yup!"

Karkat frowns down between them. Works John's pants down enough to see.

"You're depraved, you know that?"

"You like it that way."

Karkat smoothes his palm over John's dick in the briefs. "It keeps my forbearance node functioning." His fingers slip through the flap, and then his fingers uncurl, and there's a tearing sound as his claws punch through the fabric. "Even if you regularly exhaust it."

John laughs and inches Karkat's boxers down.

Karkat's mostly out, now, though not really slick at all, which is probably just as well considering the huge mess he makes when he's really turned on.

...and John didn't think to bring condoms because he didn't expect to be having sex on top of Kanaya's Engenerator.

Well. It's not like they use them most of the time anyway. Just when they need to make less of a mess.

He licks his palm and wraps his hand around Karkat's bulge, stroking him slowly, and Karkat leans forward until they're touching, so John slides his thumb and then it's both of them. Karkat feels really soft even though there's actually a bone in his, and his skin sticks to John's in all the places where they touch except in John's hand, where they're starting to both be smeared pinkish.

Karkat leans down again and kisses John's neck, his teeth scraping. His weight feels good, easy to hold, good against John's ribs. His hand closes over John's, tightening the grip, and John gasps into his hair, smelling troll and engine exhaust and _Karkat_.

He can feel the rippling muscles of Karkat's belly against his knuckles. His other hand is on Karkat's lower back, sort of suggestive but not actually grabbing him or anything, and Karkat's spine keeps flexing under his fingers, starting to get a little slick with sweat. 

He turns his head, nuzzles at Karkat's temple for a little bit before Karkat gets the message and stretches up for a kiss. Karkat breathes out into John's mouth, and John swallows the air, feeling all of Karkat inside him, and then exhales again, Karkat taking it in and John can feel every single inch of the inside of his lungs, where the oxygen passes through into Karkat's blood and goes whooshing away –

Karkat pulls his mouth away from John's and breathes in, a glorious rush of too much at once, and consumed by Karkat, John whites out.

When John's calmed down enough to pay attention again, Karkat's breathing fast, and everything is slick between them with John's come, tinged vivid pink. Karkat pulls out of John's hand to lean over the bucket, one hand on John's knee and the other on his own bulge. He stares at the floor, then looks up at John, who leans forward, meaning to join him, but Karkat comes before he can, spilling into the bucket.

Their breath is loud in the otherwise-still air of the garage.

Karkat leans forward, cuts his briefs off of John, and uses them to wipe them both up. They manage to get dressed again without incident, and okay, maybe the car looks a little smudged, but not bad enough that John feels really guilty.

"What are you going to do with that?" he asks, gesturing with his shoulder at the pail and the formerly-briefs draped over the rim.

Karkat finishes tucking his shirt in and fastens his belt. "Running-water basin in the other block."

John finishes putting on his tie and picks up the pail, opens the door into the house, and goes into the laundry room. Tips the pail into the sink and watches the red swirl down the drain, then runs some water to wash away the evidence in the sink and in the bucket. Brings it back to the garage and returning it to its hiding place.

Karkat looks really good again, a flush still lingering in his cheeks and his clothing even more rumpled. It feels pretty good knowing that a lot of those creases are John's fault. "Do you think that our room is safe now?"

"No, but at least this way I'll have the satisfaction of passive-aggressive post-facto revenge."

"I'll take that, I guess."


End file.
